A demonstrator protests the verdict in the trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King outside the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters on April 29, 1992. Riots broke out in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted the four police officers accused of beating King.

New LAPD Chief Bernard Parks returns the salute of his fellow officers during the change of command ceremonies at the Los Angeles police academy on Aug. 22, 1997.

Kevork Djansezian
/ AP

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Originally published on April 28, 2017 11:37 am

Be honest: You're looking at this story thinking what else is there to add to reports on the 1992 riots that rocked LA, right? NPR has done anniversary retrospectives before, including a huge look-back on the 20th. But in the past five years, the issue of policing — how it's done, whether it's equitable, what happens when deadly confrontations occur — has become more urgent than ever. And what happened in Los Angeles that April night 25 years ago is a critical part of the current national conversation on policing and race. For the LAPD, there have been huge changes.

"I can honestly say the LAPD of 2017 is not your grandfather's LAPD, and it's not the LAPD of Daryl Gates, that 25 years ago, plunged this city into the biggest riot in (modern) American history," says civil rights lawyer Connie Rice. Rice spent a lot of time from the late 1980s through the mid-90s challenging police aggression in the city's communities of color, especially people in poor parts of the city where policing was designed less to protect and serve, more to contain and suppress.

The police department in 1992 was largely white and overwhelmingly male. It was led by Chief Daryl Gates, an authoritarian who ruled from the top down, and brooked no opposition from those lower on the organizational chart. Gates was career LAPD, and he'd learned policing from Chief William Parker, the man who'd taken the department from a notoriously corrupt, racist machine to a sleek, paramilitary network of officers. Parker ran the LAPD before there were term limits, and was the longest-tenured chief in department history (1950-1966). Gates served as his driver and protégé before eventually ascending to the top spot himself in 1978.

Like Parker's LAPD, the organization under Daryl Gates was especially hard on communities of color.

For years before the '92 riots, Rice says, cops felt comfortable denigrating black and brown people over their radios. When the transcripts of those conversations were introduced in court cases, Rice says, "they raised the veil on the subterranean culture that LAPD exposed to the black community and the poor Latino community and any community that they decided wasn't on the right side of the thin blue line."

Being brown or black automatically made one suspect to beat officers, says writer Joe Domanick, who has spent much of his career reporting on the LAPD, as well as chronicling its evolution in his book Blue. "The LAPD was doing stop and frisk long before it was ever labeled stop and frisk," Domanick insists. This meant the department's infamous arbitrary stops — where police would roll up on a subject, jump out and make him "assume the position" (on their knees, hands behind the head, or "proned out" on the ground, face down) — often targeted law-abiding black and brown citizens. Workers. Teachers. Ministers. Anyone they felt merited a closer look. Several decades of these stops, and the brutality that often accompanied them if the person stopped asked why he was being stopped, contributed to a deep well of resentment in many of the city's black and brown neighborhoods.

So when the verdict from a mostly white jury came back, the fury wasn't just at the apparent miscarriage of justice. There was plenty of that — the videotape of King's beating had circulated globally; many felt a conviction was a slam-dunk. The rage was in opposition to decades of police mistreatment suffered by people who weren't named Rodney King.

In June, after the ashes cooled and Gates was forced to resign, the city got a new chief. An African-American one. Willie Williams arrived from Philadelphia and served one term. Most of the rank and file didn't want a black chief, and were offended that an outsider had been chosen to lead them. Williams did get some of his cops out of their cars and on the streets, and introduced the idea of community policing. But it wasn't enough. He was seen as a weak, ineffective leader and was gone in one term.

The next chief was harder to dismiss. Bernard Parks was, like Gates, an LAPD lifer. Like Williams, he was also African-American. Unlike Williams, Parks was tall and trim and looked every inch the LAPD cop. (He was even named one of People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful in 1998.) And like Gates, Parks was an authoritarian. His handling of the worst police scandal in modern LAPD history eventually cost him his job.

Jody David Armour, who teaches and writes about the nexus of race and the criminal justice system at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law, says it's hard to conceive exactly how devastating the Rampart scandal was to the LAPD. "Try to imagine taking LA Confidential, Serpico and Training Day and rolling them all into one," Armour says, "and you still don't have the magnitude of the Rampart scandal."

In the Rampart scandal, several cops from an elite, anti-gang unit were supposed to infiltrate the criminal element that was preying on the mostly-immigrant communities Rampart served. Instead of tracking the bad guys though, some of the Rampart cops became the bad guys: They tortured suspects and sold cocaine they'd stolen from police evidence rooms. Parks oversaw an investigation into the scandal, and some police were prosecuted. But despite those convictions, many felt the investigation didn't go far enough. The LAPD was forced to accept federal oversight while it overhauled itself and Parks was denied a second term. It was time for another outsider.

Enter Chief William Bratton, who'd policed New York City until his good press got under the thin skin of then-mayor Rudy Giuliani. "Broadway Bill" — a cheeky reference to the chief's love of publicity — had lowered crime using data-based policing, which analyzed information about where crimes occurred, and then dispatched adequate numbers of police to those areas to suppress it. Quality of life issues improved: a lot of homeless were hustled off the streets, the "squeegee men" who accosted drivers near tunnels and bridges demanding to clean their windshields, disappeared, the subways were safer. But vast numbers of minority New Yorkers, especially blacks and Latinos, were unfairly targeted by Bratton's stop-and-frisk tactics. Bratton brought his data-based policing to Los Angeles, but LA wasn't New York — for one thing, there was way more real estate to cover by a relatively small police force.

Armour says Bratton had to adjust his methods to his new city: "He had to develop a more community-oriented policing model, and found that actually improving those community-police relationships was consistent with good law enforcement practices, cause crime went down." Bratton also engaged the LAPD's nemesis, Connie Rice, to help him change the department's culture. At Bratton's behest, Rice got carte blanche to interview hundreds of working police officers, who told her what the challenges and potential rewards could be to changing how the LAPD operates.

There was an active effort to recruit beyond the previous white male standard. "And as more cops of color came in, you had more progressive ideas," Rice believes. "They also stopped simply taking military people. They looked for teachers, they looked for social workers, they looked for artists. So it was a different mix of recruitment."

Bratton stayed for seven years, and left, having pointed to a hand-picked successor, Charlie Beck.

Beck is the son of an LAPD officer and husband of another. Two of his children and a son-in-law are also LAPD. Beck, who oversaw and rebuilt Rampart post-scandal, wanted his officers to have the flexibility to handle things out in the field as each situation demanded. No more calling back to HQ for permission to deviate. He wanted them policing in ways that they didn't themselves become the news. (Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn't.) He also approved of several pilot projects in the city's sprawling housing projects, engaging lead residents with police officers to form community police partnerships to fight crime and reduce conflict both within and between different projects. "They serve the poor community instead of terrorizing it," Rice says.

Beck doesn't do this from Parker Center. No shrine to any past chief, the new LAPD is run from a new building with a plain-wrap name: The Police Administration Building. And because crime is significantly lower than it was in the 90s, Beck says, his people have more latitude to try different ways to police. "Rather than just chase the symptoms that are crime all day long, we can work on the root causes. So I think that's why you see us being able to emphasize trust at a greater rate than our predecessors did."

Some of that trust has been dented in the past few years, because of a number of police shootings of unarmed people of color. "There are relatively fewer than there used to be," says Joe Domanick, "but there are still questionable shootings." Even after police training and shooting policy were changed.

It may not change fully for another few years. If Charlie Beck stays till the end of his second term that, combined with Bill Bratton's previous tenure will have given LA 17 years of reform. Maybe still not enough time — but far different from the LA that blew up under Daryl Gates. LA's black and brown communities, says Rice, "have had a hundred years of abuse. They don't get erased because you've been decent for five years."

Even with the setbacks, Domanick sees overall progress. "How do I know?" he asks. "You don't have an instinctive dislike or reaction to LAPD officers." Not at the 1992 levels, anyway.

NPR's Anjuli Sastry produced and Melissa Gray edited All Things Considered's series of reports on the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Twenty five years ago this week, Los Angeles erupted.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Rodney King. Rodney King.

CORNISH: On April 29, 1992, a mostly white jury acquitted four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. For many African-Americans who lived in South LA, the verdict was an outrage. And that outrage turned into violence. The LA riots lasted five days, changed a city and is still a part of conversations today about race and policing.

Our co-host Kelly McEvers, along with Karen Grigsby Bates from our Code Switch team, went to the place where the riots began.

KELLY MCEVERS, BYLINE: OK. So we are at the corner of Florence and Normandie. We're standing next to a place called Tom's Liquor. And we've been out here a few times. And earlier when we were here at this intersection talking about the importance of the riots, we met this guy who gave us this really interesting perspective of, like, how the police here in LA have changed. His name was, Jimmy, right, Karen?

KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: It was. And he was concerned about his safety, so he didn't want to give us his last name. He's close to 50. He's been out in the streets for a while. He was from Compton but he has a lot of friends in this neighborhood, so he knows it well. And he was here during the riots. Over the years, he's had a lot of run-ins with the police, including about seven months ago. He said they're different now than they were 25 years ago.

JIMMY: The police, they respect you now because they're fearing their job.

BATES: Are you afraid of the police because...

JIMMY: No.

BATES: Were you afraid in '92?

JIMMY: I used to be. I'm not anymore.

MCEVERS: And one reason Jimmy said he's not as afraid anymore is his age. I mean, he's not out in the streets as much as he was when he was younger. And the other reason is this.

JIMMY: You remember the feds went in, they had...

MCEVERS: You think the feds having oversight over the police is a good thing?

JIMMY: Yes. Yes.

BATES: Yeah. Jimmy's talking about the federal consent decree that the LAPD was forced to work under for several years. It had a lot to do with changing the way the LAPD interacted with all of its citizens. It was integral to the reform of the police department.

The riots and federal oversight were two watershed moments for the LAPD. But to understand how the LAPD changed, we have to start with what happened at this intersection 25 years ago.

MCEVERS: Right. So what happened?

BATES: So the jury acquits the four policemen charged with beating Rodney King.

MCEVERS: Right.

BATES: Black LA was furious. People got angrier and angrier. More and more people came out into the street. And eventually, some young guys broke into a bunch of the liquor stores that are in this neighborhood, including this one that we're leaning up against.

MCEVERS: Yeah.

BATES: And things escalated quickly from there. They started throwing cans and bottles. Some pulled panicked passing drivers out of their cars and assaulted them.

MCEVERS: One of the issues was that the police didn't respond in force, especially at the beginning. You actually talked to somebody who was there at the time. He's a reporter named Joe Domanick. Let's take a listen to that.

JOE DOMANICK: One of the most astounding things about the 1992 Los Angeles riots was the response of the LAPD, which is to say no response at all.

BATES: Part of the reason there wasn't a response was because there wasn't a plan. Police brass, divorced from what was happening at street level, didn't anticipate social unrest on a major scale. No orders were coming from police headquarters at Parker Center to tell cops what to do. It was a mistake that led to the riots spreading well beyond Florence and Normandie.

DOMANICK: They were watching it all but they were not stopping it.

BATES: Joe Domanick says that's how the LAPD worked back then. It was a legacy of Chief William Parker, who ran the department from 1950 to 1966. Parker created the modern paramilitary LAPD you often see on TV shows. In 1992, his protege, Darryl Gates, was in charge.

Like Parker, Gates was an absolute authoritarian. He ran the department like an Eastern European dictator. Joe Domanick says Daryl Gates's LAPD, like Parker's, was especially hard on communities of color.

DOMANICK: The Los Angeles Police Department was doing stop-and-frisk long before it was ever labeled stop-and-frisk.

BATES: The stops were abrupt, humiliating and often done in full view of a spouse or child or neighbors. Each stop added to a deep well of community resentment. When the Rodney King verdict came down, it was on.

(SOUNDBITE OF POLICE RADIO)

BATES: Two months later, Darryl Gates was forced to resign. Joe Domanick says LA had burned before - Watts in 1965. And now this - unacceptable.

DOMANICK: It was bad for the city. It was bad for business. You can't have a city going up in flames twice in 30 years because of their police department.

BATES: Gates's LAPD, Domanick says, didn't fit with the powerbrokers' vision of a 21st century metropolis that could draw visitors and businesses from around the world. Jody David Armour teaches and writes about the intersection of race and criminal justice at the University of Southern California's law school.

Armour says the '92 riots were a wake-up call but the bigger changes happened in 1998, when a huge LAPD scandal made national news.

JODY DAVID ARMOUR: Try to imagine taking "L.A. Confidential," "Serpico" and "Training Day," rolling them all into one and you still don't have the magnitude of the Rampart scandal.

BATES: The Rampart Division of the LAPD oversaw one of the most densely populated parts of the city. The residents had been victimized by gangs and violent crime for years, so an elite anti-gang unit was tasked with covertly gathering intelligence on the bad guys.

But when it was revealed that several cops at Rampart had actually become bad guys - assaulting suspects and selling confiscated drugs - a civilian commission recommended a consent decree for federal oversight. Jody Armour.

ARMOUR: Crime actually fell while the LAPD was under the consent decree, showing that you didn't need a more paramilitary approach to policing, a more zero-tolerance approach to have effective law enforcement that reduced crime.

BATES: Ironically, this scandal happened on the watch of Bernard Parks, the city's second black police chief. Lawyer and activist Connie Rice worked with Parks's replacement, New Yorker Bill Bratton, to change police culture. She knew there was too much to lose if things didn't change.

CONNIE RICE: Every single riot in this city was triggered by law enforcement.

BATES: Rice's sunny patio is a far cry from the bleak public housing projects where she spent a lot of her time. In her work with both Bratton and the current LAPD chief, Rice says she's found a willingness to engage poor neighborhoods and police-community partnerships. These have kept the peace and built trust with many residents.

RICE: They serve the poor community instead of terrorizing and tormenting and arresting a third of the men in a community, which is what LAPD and the sheriffs did.

BATES: That was the old LAPD. Charlie Beck leads the LAPD now. The chief says crime rates today are lower than they were in the '90s and this gives his people more latitude.

CHARLIE BECK: Rather than just chase the symptoms that are crime all day long, we can work on the root causes. And so I think that that's why you see us emphasize trust at a greater rate than our predecessors did.

MCEVERS: That was Karen Grigsby Bates of our Code Switch team. I'm Kelly McEvers. We're still standing at the intersection of Florence and Normandie. Karen, it sounds like the police have thought about how to be better and there has been some progress in the LAPD since the riots, yeah?

BATES: Yes, there has been but there are - also been questionable police shootings in the past few years, as in other places. So last week, Kelly, LA's civilian police commission voted to require LAPD officers to try deescalating situations before firing their guns whenever possible.

MCEVERS: Thanks so much, Karen, for your reporting. And tomorrow, we're going to hear about another part of the LA riots that we don't always hear a lot about and that is what happened to some of the Latinos who were arrested.